by Enjoyment » Sat Aug 13, 2016 1:55 pm So, back near the end of w8, our dear coding-god, Loftar the Almighty, began to post some decent statistics, revealing all those little server things. And that's was like "Wow, what a brilliant dev-move! It is interesting and has so much potential to dev-community conversation!". And then L said like "I'll post you such info from time to time, if you are interested". And we were. And said that we were. But he never posted them again. And that's sad.
Bring it back. And I'll try to convince you about it's value.
1. "Breakin' the wall" - Revealing some of the things, which usually count as "closed development info, not interested/allowed to players" may destroy the "wall" between play and dev, replacing "Devs-are-Gods, players-are-nothing" EA-like-system with "Devs=players" Blizzard-like-system (note, Blizzard started to make some in-dev-reveals (like "designing a greedy goblins" or "development of floating damage numbers in multi-language game" not so long ago (basically, I saw them later, so I compare them to Loftar's post, not vice versa)).
2. "Makin' it clear" - such statistic sheets can be a valuable argument in some of in-game discussions. For example, while someone states something like "Archery is too OP and makes using melee retarded!", here comes L and says "for last month 17 ppl were killed by melee, while only 3 by arrows, so no.", or "yeap, the percentage of ppl killed by arrows raised a lot since last month, so it could be a valuable point of view". Note - Im not telling L should sit all the days at forum, posting his "numbers that never lies" as final argument in any community discussions, but it could really be useful in some of the most hot ones.
3. "Just for fun" - maybe not so important for game-dev, but still. We know L is a funny man, providing some really good jokes rarely from time to time. And he can post some of the statistics "just as it is, for fun". For example, after implementing hedgehogs, there were some discussions about their rarity (some ppl met them on every second step, and some wasn't able to find them for weeks). And post like "There currently 2174 hedgehogs all over the world, comparing to 6928 rabbits. So yeah, they're kinda rare, but not too much". Or just some random posts like "Farming report: percentage of currently planted crops" (like we have 179345 carrots, 89734 flax, 34920 beetroots, etc. actively growing by now), or "Statistic of currently mined ores" and so on. Im sure some part of community will definitely like this reports. And you should keep in mind, that even 5 ppl is like 2% of current player-base )
4. "My own summer" - kinda all other purposes, that I've missed, but L can easily get from dark corners of his mind - like just to entertain himself (as the original w8 posts were like).
Should state once more time:
1. Im not telling something new for devs to do instead of development. Im just voting for Loftar to bring back what he already did not so long ago.
2. IMHO, it can become one of the steps to slightly push the devs-player communication on a new level.
P.S. If L somehow will look into this thread, please, post some wierd stats in it.
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